Saturday, August 27, 2016

Etika snags PepsiCo franchise in S'pore - "Malaysian beverage and dairy manufacturer Etika Beverages, formerly known as Permanis, will be PepsiCo's new exclusive bottling partner serving both Singapore and Malaysian markets starting Nov 1... The termination of the YHS deal with PepsiCo marks the end of a long history where Coke and Pepsi were both bottled by Singapore companies. Fraser & Neave (F&N) had produced, bottled and sold Coca-Cola's drinks in Malaysia for 75 years while Coca-Cola did the same for F&N in Singapore.First Coke stops bottling in Singapore. Now it's Pepsi. Ah well.

Episode 31: The Big Kelong - "Citizenship, in particular, was a real worry for the Chinese. This was reinforced on 20 February with the release of the Reid Report on the constitution of the independent Federation of Malaya. The Nanyang Siang Pao and Sin Pao noted that that the Report did not offer universal qualifications for citizenship based on place of birth – that was contrary to the four proposals jointly submitted by 1,094 registered Chinese public bodies in the Federation. This discriminated against the Chinese. Also, Malay and English were to be the official languages. The combined Chinese public bodies had declared they would accept Malay as the sole official language, or all four languages as official languages, but promoting English alongside Malay was a continuation of colonial discrimination... Lee met with Lennox-Boyd to discuss a clause in the constitutional agreement to prevent the left-wing leaders from running in the election... Lennox-Boyd, Lim Yew Hock, and Lee Kuan Yew performed a big wayang. Lennox-Boyd announced the requirement of the clause. Lim and Lee pretended to be angry and denounced it as an act of fascist repression. Lee protested, ‘There is no guarantee that the Government in power would not use this procedure to prevent not only Communists but also democratic opponents of their policy from standing for election’... The entire left-wing leadership remained behind bars and none of them would be able to run in 1959. It would be another 40 years before Lee Kuan Yew admitted, in his autobiography, that whole thing had been fixed all along. You thought a bunch of people fixing football games was huge? Lennox- Boyd, Lee Kuan Yew, and Lim Yew Hock kelong’d an entire election."

Episode 33: The Apogee of Democracy - "Not only did Lee no longer need Lim, but the Labour Front was now an electoral liability. Lee had managed to escape the events of the previous year without taking any responsibility for the repression. Indeed, the voting public thought he was a victim of the repression, since he was leader of the PAP, which had been the target of much of the arrests. They did not know he had colluded in the repression with Lim Yew Hock... this fact is perhaps the greatest hypocrisy of the official PAP history of Singapore. Lee would go on to have his political opponents arrested on the basis that they were communist or at least communist sympathisers. But the government has never produced any proof that any of the detainees were participating in a communist conspiracy. And declassified Special Branch files show that there was never any evidence that any of them were taking part in a conspiracy. We need to be clear about this. Yes, a small number of left-wing politicians and activists believed in communism. Yes, a few might have called themselves communists. But they were not working with the Communist Party; they were not taking part in any conspiracy to violently overthrow the government; they were not breaking any laws. There was no reason to arrest any of them. The only politician that we know of who we have definite proof was secretly collaboration with the Malayan Communist Party was Lee Kuan Yew. And when the truth came out, the British did nothing. Worse, they backed him for Prime Minister and helped arrest more people to keep him in power. That is the hypocrisy at the heart of the PAP narrative of Singapore history. It proves that the situation was never about communism; it was about power. It was about protecting British interests"

In U.S., Socialist Presidential Candidates Least Appealing - "The news is likely worst for Sen. Bernie Sanders. At one point, Americans might have withheld their votes from him because of his Jewish faith -- fewer than half said they would support a Jewish candidate in 1937 -- but today his socialist ideology, given Americans' views on voting for a socialist candidate, could hinder his candidacy more. To a lesser degree, evangelical Christian candidates may suffer, in that one in four Americans say they will not vote for an evangelical Christian"

ST forum letter lacks inclusivity - "As a rambling protest letter about how a music video for NDP must be more inclusive, the letter should have best been penned by a paraplegic bisexual septuagenarian of mixed race in all four national languages who has consulted with and represented, with quotes, people from all walks of life. Instead, it was penned by a male, Chinese professional, in English, without consulting the feelings and thoughts of all the various segments of our society – including Donald Trump supporters... In future, all such videos should allocate screen time in proportion to the size of a community or interest group in our great nation. About 74 per cent of screen time should feature a Chinese person, 13 per cent a Malay person and 9 per cent an Indian person. “Others” can be represented by a five-second clip of a plate of rojak (with chili). About 52 per cent of screen time should be given to females and 48 per cent to males, although everyone will have to have their sexual orientation either printed on their shirt or tattooed on their forehead."

Why Does Everyone Hate Flying? And Other Questions Only a Pilot Can Answer - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "the average jet today actually flies a little bit more slowly than it did in 1965. But it flies more efficiently. And there’s kind of a conundrum here where the faster you go, the more energy you need... I think the most important thing we could do is stop looking at every single person who flies as a potential terrorist. It’s just an unsustainable approach in a country where 900 million people fly every year. We have to come up with something better. I’m talking about a system that takes in a whole number of data points and constructs a profile that way. I wish meanwhile, though, that TSA would get away from its preoccupation with little pointy objects and whether you have 3 ounces or 3.6 ounces of toothpaste and so on. That obsessing on minutiae just drags the whole system down. It’s a waste of resources, it’s a waste of time, a waste of money. Also I think people need to remember that even with all of the emphasis on terrorism and security today that we used to see bombings and hijackings and airport attacks so much more frequently than we do now... why can’t I have my laptop on my lap during takeoff or landing?
DUBNER: I think I know the answer to that one. Because that’s a heavy sucker, and if it flies through somewhere, it will hit me or someone else in the back of the head and that could hurt."

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, EU referendum: Osborne and Hunt on what happens next - "The political climate in Europe is changing very fast. And it is not sustainable to have a system where Denmark for example has to cope with hundreds of thousands of Syrians that have been given German passports by the German government. And that was one of the reasons why voted to leave the EU so I think the desire to change those freedom of movement rules is in the European interest as well as the British interest, but we need to give it some time and therefore wait before we invoke article 50"

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Is Junk Food the New Smoking? - "When fast food, Western soft drinks and sweets starting appearing in the Soviet Union and then Russian market, our citizens of course initially saw consumption of these products as a way to psychologically get closer to the way of life of those countries. The thing is that products of high calorie count and low nutrition value have traditionally been the basis of diet for Soviet citizens as well. These habits didn't go away. There were simply more opportunities to buy the same food, but with better consumer qualities... Recently there have been many proposals aimed at changing those food habits. One MP proposed *something* carry images on food packages in the same way as they are now put on cigarette packs"

BBC World News - Our World, China's Family Planning Army - "[On fines for multiple children] In the many cases, the team who were actually conducted this brutal behaviors to collect social maintenance fees were actually conducted by the local mafias who were hired temporarily as part-time family planning officials. What they mainly do is to arrest, to beat and to scare people."

BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent, The Opium Field - "Turks like strongmen leaders. Their founding father Ataturk was one, as fervently secular as Mr Erdogan is religious... Turkey's all-powerful president is tightening his grip still further. He's pushed through a law to strip MPs of their legal immunity, widely seen as a way of prosecuting dozens of opposition pro-Kurdish MPs so he'll have more support for changing the constitution. The party he founded has been purged of dissent. It's becoming a one man outfit that serves only his wishes, says a former MP, now a fierce critic. When he moved from being Prime Minister to President, Mr Erdogan was said to have pulled a Putin. At the party congress the new Prime Minister was in full flow. 'We are comrades of Erdogan', he said. 'Your passion is our passion, your cause our cause, your path our path'. So rapturous was he, so passionate, so emotional, that he promptly lost his voice, cutting short the speech. I wonder what the man pulling the strings made of that...
In the 17th century the [Venetian] ghetto became a centre of learning and culture. 1/3 of all Hebrew books printed in Europe before 1650 were made in Venice...
We must not be paralysed by the Holocaust... the real problem today is that the ghetto, like the rest of Venice, is becoming a museum"

Big litter woes in Choa Chu Kang - "According to Chinese daily Lianhe Wanbao, rubbish chutes from the second to eighth floors at Block 817A, Keat Hong Link, were jammed full of litter on Monday, causing a foul smell and attracting flies. The Housing Board also found that refuse-handling equipment attached to the central chute on the ground floor had malfunctioned.""If the Opposition were to win in your wards the rubbish bins would not be and would pile up 1 to 2 storeys high" - Lee Kuan Yew (attr)

Gaming a Russian Offensive | Stratfor - "For defensive purposes, Russian planners would have to recognize the risk of NATO coming to Kiev's assistance. Were that to happen, Russia would have to expand the defensive force to 40,000-55,000 troops to hold the territory... a compliant populace would require a force of only around 4,200 troops, while an extreme insurgency could spike that number to 42,000. In this particular case, no extreme insurgency is expected, as it would be in cities such as Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkiv or Kiev. The defensive force could overlap with the counterinsurgency force to some degree if there were no external threat, but if such a threat existed the forces would have to be separate, potentially doubling the manpower required to secure the territory."The projected buffer zone is 46,000 square kilometers, has 2 million people and 450km of defensive lines. Johor is 7,500 square kilometers and has 3.5 million people, but the defensive lines will be much less than Ukraine due to West Malaysia being a peninsula and not a long, flat stretch of territory. In view of this, the SAF's strength is clearly overkill.Addendum: The Malay peninsula is 317.81 km at its widest from Lumut to Kuantan. At Johor it is much narrower.Keywords: soldiers, Crimea, defend

Etika snags PepsiCo franchise in S'pore - "Malaysian beverage and dairy manufacturer Etika Beverages, formerly known as Permanis, will be PepsiCo's new exclusive bottling partner serving both Singapore and Malaysian markets starting Nov 1... The termination of the YHS deal with PepsiCo marks the end of a long history where Coke and Pepsi were both bottled by Singapore companies. Fraser & Neave (F&N) had produced, bottled and sold Coca-Cola's drinks in Malaysia for 75 years while Coca-Cola did the same for F&N in Singapore.First Coke stops bottling in Singapore. Now it's Pepsi. Ah well.

Episode 31: The Big Kelong - "Citizenship, in particular, was a real worry for the Chinese. This was reinforced on 20 February with the release of the Reid Report on the constitution of the independent Federation of Malaya. The Nanyang Siang Pao and Sin Pao noted that that the Report did not offer universal qualifications for citizenship based on place of birth – that was contrary to the four proposals jointly submitted by 1,094 registered Chinese public bodies in the Federation. This discriminated against the Chinese. Also, Malay and English were to be the official languages. The combined Chinese public bodies had declared they would accept Malay as the sole official language, or all four languages as official languages, but promoting English alongside Malay was a continuation of colonial discrimination... Lee met with Lennox-Boyd to discuss a clause in the constitutional agreement to prevent the left-wing leaders from running in the election... Lennox-Boyd, Lim Yew Hock, and Lee Kuan Yew performed a big wayang. Lennox-Boyd announced the requirement of the clause. Lim and Lee pretended to be angry and denounced it as an act of fascist repression. Lee protested, ‘There is no guarantee that the Government in power would not use this procedure to prevent not only Communists but also democratic opponents of their policy from standing for election’... The entire left-wing leadership remained behind bars and none of them would be able to run in 1959. It would be another 40 years before Lee Kuan Yew admitted, in his autobiography, that whole thing had been fixed all along. You thought a bunch of people fixing football games was huge? Lennox- Boyd, Lee Kuan Yew, and Lim Yew Hock kelong’d an entire election."

Episode 33: The Apogee of Democracy - "Not only did Lee no longer need Lim, but the Labour Front was now an electoral liability. Lee had managed to escape the events of the previous year without taking any responsibility for the repression. Indeed, the voting public thought he was a victim of the repression, since he was leader of the PAP, which had been the target of much of the arrests. They did not know he had colluded in the repression with Lim Yew Hock... this fact is perhaps the greatest hypocrisy of the official PAP history of Singapore. Lee would go on to have his political opponents arrested on the basis that they were communist or at least communist sympathisers. But the government has never produced any proof that any of the detainees were participating in a communist conspiracy. And declassified Special Branch files show that there was never any evidence that any of them were taking part in a conspiracy. We need to be clear about this. Yes, a small number of left-wing politicians and activists believed in communism. Yes, a few might have called themselves communists. But they were not working with the Communist Party; they were not taking part in any conspiracy to violently overthrow the government; they were not breaking any laws. There was no reason to arrest any of them. The only politician that we know of who we have definite proof was secretly collaboration with the Malayan Communist Party was Lee Kuan Yew. And when the truth came out, the British did nothing. Worse, they backed him for Prime Minister and helped arrest more people to keep him in power. That is the hypocrisy at the heart of the PAP narrative of Singapore history. It proves that the situation was never about communism; it was about power. It was about protecting British interests"

In U.S., Socialist Presidential Candidates Least Appealing - "The news is likely worst for Sen. Bernie Sanders. At one point, Americans might have withheld their votes from him because of his Jewish faith -- fewer than half said they would support a Jewish candidate in 1937 -- but today his socialist ideology, given Americans' views on voting for a socialist candidate, could hinder his candidacy more. To a lesser degree, evangelical Christian candidates may suffer, in that one in four Americans say they will not vote for an evangelical Christian"

ST forum letter lacks inclusivity - "As a rambling protest letter about how a music video for NDP must be more inclusive, the letter should have best been penned by a paraplegic bisexual septuagenarian of mixed race in all four national languages who has consulted with and represented, with quotes, people from all walks of life. Instead, it was penned by a male, Chinese professional, in English, without consulting the feelings and thoughts of all the various segments of our society – including Donald Trump supporters... In future, all such videos should allocate screen time in proportion to the size of a community or interest group in our great nation. About 74 per cent of screen time should feature a Chinese person, 13 per cent a Malay person and 9 per cent an Indian person. “Others” can be represented by a five-second clip of a plate of rojak (with chili). About 52 per cent of screen time should be given to females and 48 per cent to males, although everyone will have to have their sexual orientation either printed on their shirt or tattooed on their forehead."

Why Does Everyone Hate Flying? And Other Questions Only a Pilot Can Answer - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "the average jet today actually flies a little bit more slowly than it did in 1965. But it flies more efficiently. And there’s kind of a conundrum here where the faster you go, the more energy you need... I think the most important thing we could do is stop looking at every single person who flies as a potential terrorist. It’s just an unsustainable approach in a country where 900 million people fly every year. We have to come up with something better. I’m talking about a system that takes in a whole number of data points and constructs a profile that way. I wish meanwhile, though, that TSA would get away from its preoccupation with little pointy objects and whether you have 3 ounces or 3.6 ounces of toothpaste and so on. That obsessing on minutiae just drags the whole system down. It’s a waste of resources, it’s a waste of time, a waste of money. Also I think people need to remember that even with all of the emphasis on terrorism and security today that we used to see bombings and hijackings and airport attacks so much more frequently than we do now... why can’t I have my laptop on my lap during takeoff or landing?
DUBNER: I think I know the answer to that one. Because that’s a heavy sucker, and if it flies through somewhere, it will hit me or someone else in the back of the head and that could hurt."

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, EU referendum: Osborne and Hunt on what happens next - "The political climate in Europe is changing very fast. And it is not sustainable to have a system where Denmark for example has to cope with hundreds of thousands of Syrians that have been given German passports by the German government. And that was one of the reasons why voted to leave the EU so I think the desire to change those freedom of movement rules is in the European interest as well as the British interest, but we need to give it some time and therefore wait before we invoke article 50"

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Is Junk Food the New Smoking? - "When fast food, Western soft drinks and sweets starting appearing in the Soviet Union and then Russian market, our citizens of course initially saw consumption of these products as a way to psychologically get closer to the way of life of those countries. The thing is that products of high calorie count and low nutrition value have traditionally been the basis of diet for Soviet citizens as well. These habits didn't go away. There were simply more opportunities to buy the same food, but with better consumer qualities... Recently there have been many proposals aimed at changing those food habits. One MP proposed *something* carry images on food packages in the same way as they are now put on cigarette packs"

BBC World News - Our World, China's Family Planning Army - "[On fines for multiple children] In the many cases, the team who were actually conducted this brutal behaviors to collect social maintenance fees were actually conducted by the local mafias who were hired temporarily as part-time family planning officials. What they mainly do is to arrest, to beat and to scare people."

BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent, The Opium Field - "Turks like strongmen leaders. Their founding father Ataturk was one, as fervently secular as Mr Erdogan is religious... Turkey's all-powerful president is tightening his grip still further. He's pushed through a law to strip MPs of their legal immunity, widely seen as a way of prosecuting dozens of opposition pro-Kurdish MPs so he'll have more support for changing the constitution. The party he founded has been purged of dissent. It's becoming a one man outfit that serves only his wishes, says a former MP, now a fierce critic. When he moved from being Prime Minister to President, Mr Erdogan was said to have pulled a Putin. At the party congress the new Prime Minister was in full flow. 'We are comrades of Erdogan', he said. 'Your passion is our passion, your cause our cause, your path our path'. So rapturous was he, so passionate, so emotional, that he promptly lost his voice, cutting short the speech. I wonder what the man pulling the strings made of that...
In the 17th century the [Venetian] ghetto became a centre of learning and culture. 1/3 of all Hebrew books printed in Europe before 1650 were made in Venice...
We must not be paralysed by the Holocaust... the real problem today is that the ghetto, like the rest of Venice, is becoming a museum"

Big litter woes in Choa Chu Kang - "According to Chinese daily Lianhe Wanbao, rubbish chutes from the second to eighth floors at Block 817A, Keat Hong Link, were jammed full of litter on Monday, causing a foul smell and attracting flies. The Housing Board also found that refuse-handling equipment attached to the central chute on the ground floor had malfunctioned.""If the Opposition were to win in your wards the rubbish bins would not be and would pile up 1 to 2 storeys high" - Lee Kuan Yew (attr)

Gaming a Russian Offensive | Stratfor - "For defensive purposes, Russian planners would have to recognize the risk of NATO coming to Kiev's assistance. Were that to happen, Russia would have to expand the defensive force to 40,000-55,000 troops to hold the territory... a compliant populace would require a force of only around 4,200 troops, while an extreme insurgency could spike that number to 42,000. In this particular case, no extreme insurgency is expected, as it would be in cities such as Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkiv or Kiev. The defensive force could overlap with the counterinsurgency force to some degree if there were no external threat, but if such a threat existed the forces would have to be separate, potentially doubling the manpower required to secure the territory."The projected buffer zone is 46,000 square kilometers, has 2 million people and 450km of defensive lines. Johor is 7,500 square kilometers and has 3.5 million people, but the defensive lines will be much less than Ukraine due to West Malaysia being a peninsula and not a long, flat stretch of territory. In view of this, the SAF's strength is clearly overkill.Addendum: The Malay peninsula is 317.81 km at its widest from Lumut to Kuantan. At Johor it is much narrower.Keywords: soldiers, Crimea, defend